Wenatchee girls basketball coach Ron Stone gave his team a night off from practice Wednesday night, taking the Panthers out to dinner at La Fuente before heading over to the watch the Wenatchee Valley College women’s team battle Columbia Basin College at Smith Gym.

Katie Kuntz and Allie Jordan both started for the Knights in the game, and were playing for Stone last season.

Columbia Basin was leading by double-digits at halftime, but maybe seeing their former teammates in the stands will help Kuntz and Jordan raise their games. Back later with more…

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Seems as though after only two years, the Columbia Basin League is on its way out and will give way to a resurrected Big Nine Conference starting next school year.

This decision was made by the “true” 4A schools as they termed themselves at a private meeting before a scheduled meeting to discuss reorganization on Tuesday in Moses Lake. These “true” 4A schools are the ones that have been assigned that classification based on enrollment numbers: Wenatchee, Moses Lake, Pasco, Richland, Walla alla, Eisenhower, Davis and Eastmont, whose enrollment moved them up from 4A next year. 

That’s only eight teams, but Chiawana, the new school in Pasco set to open in 2009, will be 4A when that happens. Therefore, the Big Nine will operate with eight schools next year.

Kamiakin, Kennewick and Southridge had announced their intentions to opt up to 4A classification despite their 3A enrollments, but might not be welcomed by the 4A athletic directors given this announcement.

We’ll have more information in the print edition on Friday and the WIAA will officially decide whether Kamiakin, Kennewick and Southridge will be allowed to opt up on Jan. 26. A lot should be cleared up on that date.

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One of the most confounding dilemmas prep coaches face is how to approach a situation where their team is beating its opponent by an exorbitant amount.The Entiat girls basketball team beat Easton 61-8 last Friday and Tigers coach Julie Cannon managed to get her reserves some quality playing time without humiliating Easton more than necessary.

“It’s a very difficult thing,” Cannon said Tuesday night. “We did not press or fast-break at all, my starters played the first quarter and all 12 girls we brought scored, but we worked on stuff and tried to run an offense. They’re in our league so we have to play them. They’re very young and hadn’t played in over a month. We’re not trying to humiliate anybody.” 

Tom Mummert, girls coach at Kennedy High School in Burien didn’t get that message.He refused to call off the dogs in his team’s 112-16 win over Evergreen last Tuesday, which resulted in a reprimand from the Seamount League commissioner.

Wenatchee football coach Scott Devereaux drew the ire of some Davis coaches and administrators when the Panthers thrashed the Pirates 80-7 this fall. Devereaux asked for a running clock through the whole second half and used five quarterbacks in the game.

Perhaps the most famous recent example of not calling of the dogs came in February of 2006 when Epiphanny Prince, currently a guard at Rutgers University (my beloved alma mater), set a national high school record by scoring 113 points in Bergtraum High’s of Manhattan’s 137-32 win over Brandeis.The opposing coach in that case compared Prince’s relentless scoring as “picking on a handicapped person.”

What should be done here? Should there be “mercy rules” in basketball just as there are in prep baseball and softball, where the game ends if a team is winning by more than 15 after five innings? Or is it survival of the fittest? 

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I unpacked a box of equipment last Monday that ushers in an exciting change in my profession. Over $5,600 worth of video gear arrived and with it a new way of telling news stories other than still pictures and words.
It was with nervous excitement that myself, Kelly Gillin, Kathryn Stevens, Christine Pratt, Rachel Schleif and Steve Maher traveled to Yakima to attend a workshop on elementary video gathering and editing and we came away thrilled with a new way of getting information out to our readers and web users.
So it came that my first video assignment and training was last Tuesday at the Wenatchee Valley Senior Center during tap dance lessons. I spent over four hours editing the 53 minutes of raw material into three minutes of video. I hope you enjoy learning about subjects and events in our community in this new way for us.

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The Seattle Times released its prep basketball rankings for this week, and Eastmont rose to the No. 8 spot in Class 3A, the Wildcats’ highest ranking in years.

With a win over Kamiakin last Saturday, Eastmont remains the class of the Columbia Basin League 3A division.

Wenatchee, who had been ranked in the bottom half of the Times’ Class 4A Top 10 for the majority of the season, was bounced this week on the heels of a 14-point loss at Davis last Friday. The Panthers rebounded with a home win against Walla Walla Saturday, but were still out in the cold this week.

The Associated Press’ first prep polls, which will cover all classification of boys and girls basketball, will be released Wednesday and run in our paper on Thursday, so look for those. The Seattle Times only ranks 4A and 3A basketball. 

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The Wenatchee boys basketball team looked like world-beaters after dominating its seven-game non-league slate against the Columbia Basin League’s 3A division.
 
The seven wins came by an average of 19.7 points per game, but after a 15-point loss at Davis on Friday and sluggish starts in all four of its league victories, could the Class 4A Panthers’ start seem deceiving?
Wenatchee gave up 15 unanswered points to start the Davis game and trailed by double digits in the first half of three of its four league wins.

Obviously, fixed scheduling is at work here since CBL teams make arrangements two years in advance to play each other, including 4A schools vs. 3A schools. But look no further than Ron Stone and the Wenatchee girls team to see how coaches can work with the schedule. Stone and Kennewick coach Joe Harshman mutually agreed not to play each other this year, which freed Stone up to schedule a road game at Enumclaw and a home game against Puyallup, both big-name programs.

Brett McGinnis and the rest of the boys coaches are starting to get it. Losing to a very good Kentridge team 69-59 in a non-league game that McGinnis set up himself made the Panthers better.

So blog readers, what do you think? If the Panthers want to go to state, as they have said repeatedly that they do, wouldn’t games against top-flight teams give them a better gauge of where they are? Is Wenatchee’s early schedule going to come back and haunt it come playoff time? 

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I’ve gotten more interest to “Bird Song” than any other audio slideshow I’ve produced - and it last only seven seconds!

The latest response is from Carl Smith whose son, Charlie …. a composer in Seattle, wrote his own version, one with a lot more expertise and interpretation: Click here to hear it.

Thank you Carl and thank you Charlie

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Wenatchee’s bowling team defeated Ellensburg on Thursday night after enduring what assistant coach Jay Young called “a harrowing trip” over Blewett Pass on its way to the match. The team’s bus blew a tire just 10 miles outside Ellensburg by Exit 115 and limped into a nearby gas station. Ellensburg High School dispatched one of its own buses to rescue the stranded bowlers. While the match was going on, a local Les Schwab repaired the bus and the team arrived safely home without incident.  

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Colleague Scott Spruill of the Yakima Herald-Republic vents some post-holiday fumes over the Columbia Basin League reclassification quagmire. An unfortunate situation, to be sure.

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Old friend Andy Gale tells me that his son Nick and Erik Magnussen, both standout wrestlers and defensive linemen at Eastmont, will be taking official college visits to Portland State this weekend, with hopes of locking in scholarship offers to play football. Both Gale and Magnussen are ranked No. 1 in the state in the 285 and 215-pound weight classes among 3A wrestlers, but see their futures on the gridiron. They barely broke a sweat in victories against Southridge on Tuesday night, with Magnussen stopping his foe in 45 seconds and Gale earning a 17-3 major decision.Portland State head coach Jerry Glanville’s recruiting trail led him to the Gale’s house in East Wenatchee to visit with the pair, who are best buds off the field. 

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